rome on tlc: interesting, but i don't believe it.
I remain pro-knife. You have to catch someone before you can stab him; knives don't ricochet; and people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives. A better deal.
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
I watched Hard Rain on Showtime this evening. This was an action movie from last year starring Christian Slater as an armored truck guard whose truck gets held up during a violent rain storm that's flooding a small Indiana town. He hides the money and so gets pursued by the holdup men, led by Morgan Freeman, who are in turn pursued by the sheriff and his men, led by Randy Quaid. Christian hooks up with the town's stained glass artist who's refurbishing a church (Minnie Driver). Meanwhile, the rain just keeps on coming and the dam's overflowing. Chaos ensues.
Hard Rain isn't a bad movie--there are some very inventive sequences and plot developments, and the characters are all distinguishable from one another--but it's a great example of why the action genre is in the doldrums.
Every action movie needs a hook, and this movie's is: everything will happen in three feet of water or more. When you have this kind of environment, you have to use it. You've got to justify blowing that kind of money. What you do is come up with a variety of new and spectacular ways of having car chases and killing people.
Which becomes the focus of the movie. Every sequence is built around some fantastic using the milieu. There's a chase scene on wave runners inside an elementary school. People get trapped in jail cells and handcuffed to staircases (actually, these two scenes are far too similar for the movie's good). Electrocution on city streets. And so on.
The characters are drawn with broad strokes, so you can always tell them apart, but there's no development. Why is Christian Slater so determined to save the money? (He seems more adamant about that than saving his own neck.)
The movie does make the principle that the writer should make things difficult on his characters paramount. Nothing works right the first, second, or third times. It got to be a joke after a while. The entire movie is an exercise in frustration, mostly because we know Christian Slater isn't going to drown, but Minnie can't seem to get him out of where he is.
Darin and Fernando worked on a new remote control setup for the TV/stereo in the living room. They said something about making a new infrared device and they disappeared downstairs to Darin's office. I could tell they were working, though, because periodically the volume would get REAL LOUD and sometimes the TV would go mute.
In fact, during Law and Order the muting was expertly done, despite the fact that they were on a different floor: they always muted when some new piece of information came up. "She murdered him with the [mute]." "We now know she did it because [mute]." "We'll try to get her to plead [mute]."
In Molly Ivins' column today about gun control, she says, sarcastically, about the Jewish Community Center shootings:
If those 5-year-olds in LA had just been packing, none of 'em would have gotten hurt.
She almost wrote that last week, but she didn't use it because it was too flip.
I said the exact same thing to Darin the day of the shootings, but I didn't put it in here because I thought it was too flip.
I remembered how after the Columbine High School shootings pro-gun advocates said, "If only there had been armed guards..." Except there were, and the shootings went on.
It makes me crazy that there are people out there who firmly believe our society would be safer when more people are armed. It's almost enough to make me whip out my Irish passport and say, "Honey, we're moving to the European Community." Except I've told Darin he gets to choose when we make the next move.
I actually wrote today! Then I napped.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com